


Angel of Fathoms

by Mistress Mimosa (flinchflower)



Series: Introspect, Intuition, Inference [1]
Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-15
Updated: 2011-10-15
Packaged: 2017-10-24 15:13:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/264921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flinchflower/pseuds/Mistress%20Mimosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A case goes wrong, and the unsub captures Reid.  Can they find him before the unsub makes his final move?  Archive warning is for violence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Angel of Fathoms

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: just a writing exercise, not for profit.

  


### The angel perched atop the marble knelt on one knee, toes peeping out from her flowing robe. Her hands were clasped, long sleeves falling back, and her head was bowed in prayer. Her wings, at rest, suffered, the top arch of one wing sheared off above her shoulder.

  


Spencer Reid’s awareness crept with glacial, terrapin steps toward consciousness. The sensation of chilling cold, the feeling of whatever heat was left to his body seeping away in steady increments, was the first to register. The next sense, launched by a prehistoric and reptilian reaction to the icy surface when he attempted to recoil instinctively from the biting sensation, was that of pain. His conscious mind warred with those two tangibilities, back and forth, a haze of impressions, until finally, the need for resolution outweighed the fear of the pain.

And by that point, the chill had numbed a vague portion of the burning, piercing pain, so that Spencer’s movement simply instigated the ache of stiff muscles, unused and annoyed with the disturbance of their comfortably hypothermic torpor.

Spencer would always remember the next sequence of events. The word hypothermic brought him fully awake, cognizant of the myriad dangers, wanting - stretching - unable to do anything but act to protect himself, aware that his body was too cold to even shiver at the sensation of cold - stone, grass, grit - beneath him. That desperation drastically and jarringly contrasted with the beautiful face that seemed to lean above him. Her head bowed, hands clasped, and wings at rest, her face woke an impossible longing within him. His hand reached toward her, and he felt inexplicably shamed that his skin was stained with blood.

And then his logical mind grasped the situation firmly, seeing the harsh line delineating the missing portion of wing, the rigidity of the expression, and produced the word ‘statue’ out of his cold-induced fog. Nearly incongruous in his surroundings - mist rising from the ground surrounding him, and there was very little light. The moon stood behind the angel’s bowed head, and would have been framed by her wings, had one of them not been stolen, chaining her to earth - having recognized her for what she was, Spencer tried to sit up and failed. The fire of agony along his left side stole the breath from him, stole the creepingly increasing awareness of thought from him for long moments.

The assertion of logic moments later was a relief, as his fingers moved without pain, proved by that strange reaching out to someone else’s graven image. He pulled his phone out, was able to focus on it, and his thumb darted around of it’s own accord, sending a blanket text to the team, vaguely thinking that if he took a picture, someone would know.

“Bring me home.”

  


###### The angel leaned an elbow on to the marble, her head resting wearily on her hand. Her free hand clasped a laurel wreath, resting on her knee. Her wings, at rest, drooped down in despair.

  


The text came through on JJ's phone.

”HOTCH!!!”

“I see it, JJ - can any of you get anything more from him?”

The image came through seconds later, and Rossi cut loose with a string of Italian curses that startled Emily’s eyes wide open, even her cosmopolitan upbringing shocked, gasping at the vulgarity.

“That’s St... my God...

“Rossi, I swear if you don’t out with it I’ll strangle you and save Hotch the trouble-”

“Morgan,” came the gentle words. “It’s... it’s St. Gideon’s Cemetery,” he said, voice hushed with something that wavered on the brink of compassion and sternness. “Let’s go, team.”

They trailed behind him as he strode off, well aware of the look of the frantic trapped agony that Hotch’s eyes flashed, knowing what it might mean.

“The important thing is, he’s ALIVE,” Rossi barked, “And we’re about to get him back, because there’s a pair of armed uniforms at the gate who should be to him in about twenty seconds, and we’ll be there in three minutes ourselves-”

Garcia choked, eyes welling up with tears. She had no eyes, there were no cameras in the cemetery. The image of the angel on her screen, leaning to the side as if tired, and yearning to put aside the laurel wreath - VICTORY, Garcia’s esoteric knowledge bank produced. Her hands cradled her head, unable to look any longer, and she moaned something that might have been the word no. Her heart begged Spencer not to give up the win they were about to covetously seize in the dark of night, nothing more than the moon to guide them.

Morgan closed his eyes as he listened to his baby girl, and roughly shoved his own phone, saturated with the image of the quelling angel, deep into his pocket as they raced for the SUVs.

“It changes the whole fucking PROFILE,” Hotchner shouted in anguished frustration. “This guy - what if it’s not about the victimology here - what if WE are the damn victims - help me do this,” came the desperately uncharacteristic plea.

“That means we know him,” Morgan said, able to speak while running, unlike some of the others.

The new rush of effort - the thought that the name might be in her databases re-lit the fire in Garcia’s eyes. “I’m on it!” came the Amazon cry into her headset, reassured by Morgan’s conviction, knowing she could do this for her boys.

“He’s Christian - Catholic -” Rossi threw out, “A cemetery named from a saint-”

“Garcia, narrow the profile to the years that the lot of us and Reid worked with Gideon - focus on cases from any times where Rossi consulted with the BAU!”

“YES,” Rossi said fiercely. “Cross-reference that to the years that I spent teaching!”

They could all hear Garcia’s fingers flying through her virtual world, bringing possibilities into realities for them. The sound of her anxiety was marked in short and shallow breaths, occasionally punctuated by a long draw of oxygen into her system as she switched into new systems and waited the inhuman minutes until the passcodes authorized.

The lists on her screen narrowed, knocking off thousands, hundreds, dozens - and -

“TWO!” came her exclamation, and in the moments following, both the BAU and the local law enforcement would hear the woman’s calm in reciting out the addresses, and wonder what gave her the strength to not fail them, the way the local police and Hotch himself had failed in allowing Spencer to head back to the hotel alone.

The mistake came in trusting the pattern overly much, trusting an unsub not to deviate from typical behavior. Only now that they were frantically discussing it, the kills so far had all been designed in some way to eat away at the agents - the last one in particular seemed to target Spencer...

  


### The angel slumped over the gravestone, head cradled on one arm, face down. Her free hand dangled from the surface of the stone, fingers stained, one snapped. Her exhausted wings framed her perfectly, and the light just touched her shoulders.

  


It was desperately difficult for Spencer to not give up, to continue to let his fingers dance along the screen of the phone, all the while noting that his hands, though bloody, were undamaged. That alone sent relief coursing through Spencer, and his eyes roamed around himself, looking at the angel above him, contrasting it with the one who seemed to hover over his feet, slumped in despair, or maybe it was exhaustion. Either way, he felt as if he understood the limpness, the drooping of her wings. He wanted badly to look back at the two words - three if you counted the contraction - that JJ texted back.

“We’re coming.”

But he wasn’t just texting, as his fingers spilled words into the phone. That he could do in his sleep. No, he was logging the last hours of his existence in a steady stream to Garcia. His awareness dismissed his cold surroundings and pain, brushed instead over perfect images of walls, along corridors, dragging a bait trail across the senses of anyone who might read this, and find those bloody rooms.

Garcia’s eyes were locked on the words scrolling across her screen, her mind scrambling to ascertain whether or not the information was relevant to the cemetery, or to the unsub, because the texts were only to her.

 _The final room,_ read the last text, _was the most horrifying. Arterial spray, that was clear, some of it still damp, and it was artistically painted on the wall, a pointilistic scene of ocean waves crashing onto a beach. The implements in the room didn’t gleam, they were bloodsoaked, dark, and the evocatively pungent combination of fear and blood and damp metal overpowered my other senses._

Garcia’s eyes closed, wishing she could text back, but she knew the stream of consciousness would be better uninterrupted - JJ had taken a risk to send the one text, they had no way of knowing if Spencer was trying to conceal the phone. Reid’s eidetic memory, as technical as it often was, produced the most evocative picture of a scene, if he were typing or writing, and she wondered if he too would write books when he grew older, the way Rossi had.

 _The victims were all tortured, and this is the room where that was performed. And their loved ones tortured with the information they had screamed out. I will die here, rather than reveal anything about my team or my mother, or any of the sins that stain my own soul. He’s rambling on about sin, and I know there is no God, because why would He place me in this situation a second time, to the warped fanaticism of someone crusading in His name? But I have lived this before, and I know what to do._

Garcia’s tears were flowing freely, very little of Spencer’s words needing to be relayed, and she ached for the rest of the team, who would read these very words in this file when the final report was produced on this case. He needed to live, or it would wound each of their team beyond... salvation was the only word that came to her mind, littered with all of the religious iconography of the case, and she hated it for it’s existence in her brain.

 _My only recourse seems to be to lock myself into the world of Middle English, Chaucer - and if it’s beyond that time, then perhaps the Ormulum or Wycliffe’s Bible, though that seems a travesty in the light of the religious aspects of this failing scrap of humanity, who screams at me. Perhaps Chaucer will extend for me, beyond his descent into madness. It should not take long, he fails to pick up any tools of torture -_

 _  
**“The pardoner conspires to set himself up as a moveable shrine endowed with relics unsurpassed by those of anyone else in England...”**   
_

 

  


### The angel stepped down from the gravestone, face serene. Her hands held gathered flowers clasped to her, sunlight touching her forearm and the halo of her hair. Her wings, though small, were aloft, as if they might flutter at any moment.

  


The overly familiar set of words were comforting, and his attention tried to slip out from where he lay huddled beneath the angels. His ears sought out sounds only to be profoundly jarred by the sounds of yelling- a rustle from beyond the slumped angel, his captor emerging briefly into view. And then there was the haze of shock that the sound of immediate gunfire brought, echoing against the gravestones and pavers, until Spencer himself whimpered under the repeated onslaught of noise. The unsub’s back arched at a nearly impossible angle, Spencer noted.

The gunfire sounded odd to him, pitched incorrectly, but the arterial spray from the bullet wounds distracted him. The dark, red, viscous liquid arced up and around and through...

That memory of the arterial spray mural colluded with the events strobing before him, and in a moment of what felt like a connection to the divine, Spencer could see the whole picture of the case clearly, fingers still texting Garcia on autopilot.

The connections were endless. Vice, arms, the children’s unit... Garcia’s mouth dropped open, unable to do anything but stare for moments. And then she began preparing the emails, so they could be released as soon as Hotch processed the information and gave the authorization for communication to other FBI units. She shivered, thinking of how long it would take a proper memorial for all the victims to be raised, and she vowed to include Spencer somehow, some tribute to her boy.

A blue knee hit the pavement next to his head, and Spencer curiously found that he was completely unable to move, though he was quite thankful for the officer removing the gag, knife slitting through the now painful zip ties constraining Spencer’s wrists.

“Are you - Danny, bring the kit. Are you all right, sir? Dr. Reid?”

He tossed off a wry grin. “I will be in a few, sir,” he told the officer, who looked to be about the same age as Hotch. "My team -"

“They are on their way,” the officer said shortly. “Where - damn,” the man said softly, looking at the blood on the ground.

“What? What is it-” He’d been enveloped of the fog of his memory, distantly connected to Garcia as he’d related his experiences - a nervous glance over at the unsub revealed a huge pool of blood, and the other blue uniformed man standing over him.

“It’s not bad, Dr. Reid, but you’re cold, and you’ve bled quite a bit. You’re going to be fine, there’s an ambulance on your team’s six.”

“Hmm. I don’t really like hospitals.”

The man’s broad face broke into a grin, and he leaned a little closer. Spencer grunted with pain as the fire in his side responded to the pressure the officer was wielding, and the coarse rub of the gauze pad on his inflamed skin. The young agent tried to breathe through it, knowing that it would help, and wondering why in all hell he hadn’t had the presence of mind to put pressure on the wound himself. He was quite woozy - and his head turned to the left, away from the unsub, away from the despairing spirit, away from the broken and grounded angel.

The image that greeted his eyes - caring, hands full of flowers - she stepped down off of her pedestal towards him, and his confused mind registered safety and peace, even through the burning of the pressure on the wound in his side. He closed his eyes momentarily.

“Spencer!”

It was Emily. Her face wavered with the angel’s - the statue’s, and he smiled at her.

“Hey, you’re here,” he said. The voices of his team members crowded in around him, and he felt a little warmer, Emily’s FBI jacket draped over him, even as she scolded. The slight perfume of it oriented him a little further towards calm.

“Don’t you EVER do that again.”

Morgan’s relieved frown weighed in next, to his amusement, “You’re gonna be escorted wherever you step away from us on cases from here on out, kid.”

 

“Relax, Spencer, the paramedics are right behind us.” Hotch was always practical, and Spencer scanned for Rossi and JJ - there, with the unsub - he was safe, the team was here, complete-

“Tell Garcia thanks,” he said, and despite the protests, he was tired enough, safe enough, and just this once he was going to give in to the blessing of unconsciousness. Just this once. The worry, it could be someone else’s cross to bear - and Hotch enjoyed that sort of thing.

  


### The angel's face, peaceful. Arms burdened with a cross. But her face looked up to the heavens,her faith shining through.

  



End file.
